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I like to imagine there’s some sort of optimist club or new age group out there that feels crab cakes invoke too many negative emotions with their crabbiness so they have to substitute with fish. That’s just my quirky imagination, though.

What else do you want me to say? I’m just going to list the ingredients now, ok?

What you’ll need.

1/4 cup of chopped shallots

1/4 cup of chopped garlic

1/4 cup of chopped lemongrass, inner portion only

1 tablespoon of chopped ginger

1/2 teaspoon of peppercorns

1 teaspoon of grated lime peel

1 tablespoon of shrimp paste

5-10 dried chilies, seeded, soaked, and shredded

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1 pound of boneless whitefish steak, minced

1 egg, beaten

1/2 pound of French beans, trimmed and finely chopped.

Vegetable oil

The first step, is to get your handy dandy food processor out and grind up the shallots, garlic, lemongrass, ginger, peppercorns, lime peel, shrimp paste, chilies, and salt. Blend til you get a smooth operating paste.

Once properly smoothed, add your fish to the food processor and mix until it matches the paste consistency. Finally add the egg to this food processor mixture.

When all of these elements have been combined, switch over to a mixing bowl and stir in the green beans for more mixing.

We are now ready to make our patties. Do so, by spooning a tablespoon’s worth of the mixture and forming that into a round cake. Repeat this process until all of the mixture is used up.

The final step is to fry the patties and to do so, we need to heat 1/8 to a 1/4 inch of vegetable oil over medium heat. Once you reach a temperature of 350, fry the fish cakes until golden.

Pat the grease out with a paper towel once fried and then you are ready to eat!

Positive thinking pescetarian cake

It looks like chicken doesn’t it? It kind of tastes like chicken too. I would say that’s odd but everything tastes like chicken, except beef and pork. That’s the real oddity there. Why does that meat taste so different? Are they more bold?

These thoughts actually kind of bother me, because I love animals, but I also like eating some of them. Now I feel like a jerk!

My next recipe comes from Sicilian Cookery and you could say it is a variation of eggplant Parmesan with a substitute of a cheese called caciocavallo which is a native cheese of Southern Italy.

The quest to find caciocavallo was the hardest part of making this dish and finding it caused a bit of a hiatus for my cooking goals. My first attempt to buy this cheese was at a specialty cheese shop where they just happened to run out the previous day. They ordered it again, but by the time I got there it was sold out. I had no idea this cheese was so popular. I decided to go to Whole Foods after that and ended up empty handed, thankfully Bristol Farms had some. I must have been lucky that day, because I looked for it again out of curiosity after making this recipe and it was M.I.A. in the cheese section.

Hopefully you’ll have better luck with that than I did.

What you’ll need

3 eggplants

4 cloves of garlic

4-5 ripe tomatoes

4 oz or 1/4 pound of caciocavallo cheese

2 oz or 1/2 cup of grated cheese

4 or 5 basil leaves

The first step is to prepare the eggplants by cutting them lengthwise into sections as evenly as possible. Then you will cut slits into the fleshy part of the eggplant and soak in salted water for ten minutes.

I wanted to look up the physics as to why salting and soaking is necessary for eggplants and ended up finding this useful article from the LA Times. According to Russ Parsons, it only makes a difference to salt if you are frying. He also feels for there to be a true impact, the soaking should take place for at least 60 minutes.

I have to say, I think Russ is on to something, because when I’ve salted eggplant for only ten minutes, it didn’t do much at all.

Whatever you decide, once you’ve soaked the eggplant, you will pat dry and then allow it to cool. While it is cooling, you can prepare the tomato sauce that will eventually go on top of our eggplant concotion.

To make the sauce, the first step is to prepare the tomatoes by skinning and chopping them. If you don’t recall the proper way to do this, what you need to do is cut x’s into the top of the tomato and then boil them for about a minute. Throw those boiled tomatoes on some ice and then the skin should peel off. After that, you cut and set aside.

The next step for the sauce is to fry two whole cloves of garlic in oil. Remove the cloves once they’ve been sufficiently fried. I love garlic and didn’t want to remove them, but leaving fried garlic in sauce can make the sauce bitter. If you want to keep the garlic anyway, I suggest mincing the garlic and lightly frying. My mother always told me the longer you let a garlic fry, the more sugar you have to add later to sweeten the bitterness.

Food is like people sometimes.

Once the garlic is ready, whether you keep or discard, the next step is to add those chopped tomatoes. Do so and cook for 5-10 minutes while stirring and sprinkling basil, salt, and pepper to taste.

As the sauce cooks, cut the garlic and caciocavallo into pieces that will fit in the slits you made for the eggplant pieces.

Once the slits are stuffed, sprinkle with some basil and then top them off with tomato sauce. As long as the sauce is cooked, of course.

The final touch will be to sprinkle with grated cheese and oil and bake for 30 minutes on the 350 setting of an oven.

Once your time is up, you’ll have a tasty alternative version to eggplant Parmesan.

My final result turned out well enough. I prefer Parmesan when it comes to eggplant. Caciocavallo is a bitter and harder cheese than Parmesan. I feel it doesn’t compliment the eggplant in a way that I like. I prefer the delicious gooey texture of melted Parmesan that pulls apart like string cheese.

Mmmm, string cheese

Have I mentioned that I love cheese lately? It’s important to tell the people things you love that you love them everyday. The little things count in this troubled world and the comfort of cheese is getting me through these troubling times every day.

Back to this dish, though. It was an enjoyable experience, but it doesn’t beat Parmesan for me and it’s not worth the effort and hunt to use caciocavallo, in my opinion. If you’re adventurous, definitely try it out. Life is too short to not try new things.